Flutterings

The stack of reading in my bathroom currently includes the Winter 1996 issue of The Paris Review. This section of TPR's interview of Helen Vendler leapt out at me:

INTERVIEWER: What is your perception of your own power?

VENDLER: I can see that it seems a great deal of power to a young writer to be reviewed or not reviewed in The New York Times . . . as though it could make or break the book. Reviewing may seem like power, but it's very ephemeral power. Yes, if I review a book in The New York Times or The New Yorker more libraries will buy it, but that doesn't mean it will be looked on favorably in fifty years. There are millions of books that have been bought by libraries that nobody will ever read again after the year in which they're published.

INTERVIEWER: I wondered how you felt being depicted in The New York Times recently by a caricaturist as a head on a tank.

VENDLER: I thought it was very funny. My son, much amused, said, "My mother is a tank." The odd thing for me in seeing it is that I write mostly appreciative reviews, so a tank armed with a phallic howitzer, or whatever my fountain pen was supposed to be, seemed to me not quite the right representation for the kind of admiring reviews that I normally write. However, since a female who expresses herself decisively seems to this world someone armed with ammunition, it's probably fair enough.

From 60 Minutes:

Bob Simon [interviewer]: Barbara Jo Rubin - B.J. for short -- was one of the first female jockeys. She started out 44 years ago.

Bob Simon [to B.J. Rubin]: How bad was it when you started?

B.J.: A lot of trainers wouldn't let me even come under their shed row. You know it was bad luck.

Bob Simon: Did they say why?

B.J.: Yes it was bad luck and they wanted me outta there.

Bob Simon [to audience]: And they got her outta there. She ended up racing in the Bahamas because male jockeys in Florida threatened to shut down the track if she competed. The boycott collapsed eventually. But even when B.J. became the first woman to win a race in the states, the chauvinists kept on shouting.

B.J.: A lot of 'em would boo at me and tell me to go home, make babies, get outta there. It was not a woman's place to be on the racetrack.That was more than 40 years ago, and times have changed. But how much? Some of the boys in the stands still refuse to shut up.

Bob Simon: What do they say?

Rosie Napravnik [who will be riding Mylute this Saturday]: Go home and have a baby. Go home and stay in the kitchen.

Bob Simon [to audience]: It's one thing to ignore hecklers. But what about the people who put her in the saddle?

Rosie Napravnik: There still are owners and trainers that don't want to ride a female. The only way that I deal with that is, you know, to try to beat that person in a race, beat that trainer or owner in a race.